ScottGu announced last night that Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0 is now available - and the final release is not far off!

This update has lots of bug fixes and some breaking changes, and is a developer-only release (end users will not receive this update). So this gives developers some time to get Silverlight 2 Beta 2 applications ready for the official release of Silverlight 2.

Here are a couple of notes on new things to look for in this release...

HitTest has moved to VisualTreeHelper

Prior to Silverlight 2 RC0, the code to do a hit test on a point within an element looked something like this:

List<UIElement> hits = path.HitTest(ptTest) as List<UIElement>;

In Silverlight 2 RC0, we now use the VisualTreeHelper class (this is more like WPF) to do a Hit Test:

List<UIElement> hits = System.Windows.Media.VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(ptTest, path) as List<UIElement>;

Blend now Handles Font Embedding

The Silverlight runtime includes only a handful of fonts, but you can add fonts into your Silverlight XAP to extend the number of available fonts in your application.  Note that you need to be careful with licensing on any fonts you embed, as this forum post explains. 

In prior releases of Blend and Silverlight, the process of adding these fonts was manual. But Blend now includes functionality to automatically add a font to your application. I'll post more on this in the future...